to end this post, let me share something about teaching, from the ah boy who stays at kim tian.
Teaching is a creative profession and not an easy one.
A person should not be qualified to be a teacher if salary is the only motivation behind his/her teaching which involves sharing of knowledge. If one shares what he/she knows with others only when paid, he/she is more of an information broker than a teacher. And in this case a mercenary one, since we now live in an era where textbook information imparted by teachers are freely available on the Internet.
I'm not implying that school teachers should all teach for free. School teachers should get paid not because of the information they share with students but because of how they share it - they should get paid because of the effort and precious time they spend on preparing and delivering the teaching.
And to deliver creative and effective teaching, one has to be a genuine teacher who teaches not owing to money but due to passion, who will gladly share his/her knowledge with everyone on all occasions unless it is verboten such as during a closed-book test.
Teachers are the lifeblood of school education and we can improve school education, on a microscopic scale, by hiring more genuine teachers that are suitable for this creative profession and encouraging information brokers in disguise to become more enthusiastic about teaching or simply firing them.
